A Manifesto for Rewilding the World

Until modern humans arrived, every continent except Antarctica possessed a megafauna. In the Americas, alongside mastodons, mammoths, four-tusked and spiral-tusked elephants, there was a beaver the size of a black bear: eight feet from nose to tail(1). There were giant bison weighing two tonnes, which carried horns seven feet across(2).

The short-faced bear stood thirteen feet in its hind socks(3). One hypothesis maintains that its astonishing size and shocking armoury of teeth and claws are the hallmarks of a specialist scavenger: it specialised in driving giant lions and sabretooth cats off their prey(4). The Argentine roc (Argentavis magnificens) had a wingspan of 26 feet(5). Sabretooth salmon nine feet long migrated up Pacific coast rivers(6).

During the previous interglacial period, Britain and Europe contained much of the megafauna we now associate with the tropics: forest elephants, rhinos, hippos, lions and hyaenas. The elephants, rhinos and hippos were driven into southern Europe by the ice, then exterminated around 40,000 years ago when modern humans arrived(7,8,9). Lions and hyaenas persisted: lions hunted reindeer across the frozen wastes of Britain until 11,000 years ago(10,11). The distribution of these animals has little to do with temperature: only where they co-evolved with humans and learnt to fear them did they survive.

Most of the deciduous trees in Europe can resprout wherever the trunk is broken. They can survive the extreme punishment – hacking, splitting, trampling – inflicted when a hedge is laid. Understorey trees such as holly, box and yew have much tougher roots and branches than canopy trees, despite carrying less weight. Our trees, in other words, bear strong signs of adaptation to elephants. Blackthorn, which possesses very long spines, seems over-engineered to deter browsing by deer; but not, perhaps, rhinoceros.

All this has been forgotten, even by professional ecologists. Read any paper on elephants and trees in East Africa, and it will tell you that many species have adapted to “hedge” in response to elephant-attack(12,13,14,15). Yet, during a three-day literature search in the Bodleian library, all I could find on elephant adaptation in Europe was a throwaway sentence in one scientific paper(16). The elephant in the forest is the elephant in the room: the huge and obvious fact that everyone has overlooked.

Since then much of Europe – especially Britain – has lost most of its mesofauna as well: bison, moose, boar, wolf, bear, lynx, wolverine, even, in most parts, wildcat, beavers and capercaillie. These losses, paradoxically, have often been locked in by conservation policy.

Conservation sites must be maintained in what is called “favourable condition”: which means the condition in which they were found when they were designated. More often than not this is a state of extreme depletion: the merest scraping of what was once a vibrant and dynamic ecosystem. The ecological disasters we call nature reserves are often kept in this depleted state through intense intervention: cutting and burning any trees that return; grazing by domestic animals at greater densities and for longer periods than would ever be found in nature. The conservation ethos is neatly summarised in the forester Ritchie Tassell’s sarcastic question: “how did nature cope before we came along?”(17).

Through rewilding – the mass restoration of ecosystems – I see an opportunity to reverse the destruction of the natural world. Researching my book Feral, I came across rewilding programmes in several parts of Europe, including some (such as Trees for Life in Scotland and the Wales Wild Land Foundation) in the UK, which are beginning to show how swiftly nature responds when we stop trying to control it (18,19). Rewilding, in my view, should involve reintroducing missing animals and plants, taking down the fences, blocking the drainage ditches, culling a few particularly invasive exotic species but otherwise standing back. It’s about abandoning the Biblical doctrine of dominion which has governed our relationship with the natural world.

The only thing preventing a faster rewilding in the European Union is public money. Farming is sustained on infertile land (by and large, the uplands) through the taxpayer’s munificence. Without our help, almost all hill-farming would cease immediately. I’m not calling for that, but I do think it’s time the farm subsidy system stopped forcing farmers to destroy wildlife.

At the moment, to claim their single farm payments, farmers must prevent “the encroachment of unwanted vegetation on agricultural land”(20). They don’t have to produce anything: they merely have to keep the land in “agricultural condition”, which means bare. I propose two changes to the subsidy regime. The first is to cap the amount of land for which farmers can claim money at 100 hectares (250 acres). It’s outrageous that the biggest farmers harvest millions every year from much poorer taxpayers, by dint of possessing so much land(21). A cap would give small farmers an advantage over large. The second is to remove the agricultural condition rule.

The effect of these changes would be to ensure that hill farmers with a powerful attachment to the land and its culture, language and traditions would still farm (and continue to reduce their income by keeping loss-making sheep and cattle(22)). Absentee ranchers who are in it only for the subsidies would find that they were better off taking the money and allowing the land to rewild.

Despite the best efforts of governments, farmers and conservationists, nature is already beginning to return. One estimate suggests that two thirds of the previously-forested parts of the US have reforested, as farming and logging have retreated, especially from the eastern half of the country(23). Another proposes that by 2030 farmers on the European Continent (though not in Britain, where no major shift is expected) will vacate around 30 million hectares (75 million acres), roughly the size of Poland(24). While the mesofauna is already beginning to spread back across Europe, land areas of this size could perhaps permit the reintroduction of some of our lost megafauna. Why should Europe not have a Serengeti or two?

Above all, rewilding offers a positive environmentalism. Environmentalists have long known what they are against; now we can explain what we are for. It introduces hope where hope seemed absent. It offers us a chance to replace our silent spring with a raucous summer.

The animals I’m referring to are the straight-tusked elephant and the Merck’s and narrow-nosed rhinoceri. Woolly mammoths and woolly rhinos, which were mostly grass-eaters, living in cold dry steppes without trees, moved in with the cold weather.

The last record of a lion in the region is a bone from an animal that lived in the Netherlands – then still connected to Britain – 10,700 years ago. Derek Yalden, 1999. The History of British Mammals. T and AD Poyser, London.

And in South Africa: Graham Kerley et al, 2008. Effects of elephants on ecosystems and biodiversity. In: RJ Scholes and KG Mennell (eds) Elephant Management: A Scientific Assessment of South Africa. Witwatersrand University Press, Johannesburg.

Oliver Rackham, no date given. Ancient Forestry Practices. In Victor R Squires (ed). The Role of Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries in Human Nutrition, Volume II. Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems.

Official Journal of the European Union, 31st January 2009. Council Regulation (EC) No 73/2009 of 19 January 2009, establishing common rules for direct support schemes for farmers under the common agricultural policy and establishing certain support schemes for farmers, amending Regulations (EC) No 1290/2005, (EC) No 247/2006, (EC) No 378/2007 and repealing Regulation (EC) No 1782/2003. Annex III. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2009:030:0016:0016:EN:PDF

In Wales, on 2010 figures, the average subsidy for sheep farms on the hills is £53,000. Average net farm income is £33,000. The contribution the farmer makes to his income by raising sheep and cattle, in other words, is minus £20,000. Institute of Biological, Environmental and Rural Sciences, Aberystwyth University, 2011. Farm Outputs – all sizes. Table B3: Hill sheep farms, 2009/2010. https://www.aber.ac.uk/en/media/0910Iy_11d.pdf

4 thoughts on “A Manifesto for Rewilding the World”

Great interview on RTE radio yesterday in Ireland, George, especially following coverage of the (insane) CAP negotiations. You held up well to the interviewer, an opinionated know-it-all who constantly interrupts his interviewees. I normally don’t listen to his show for that reason but stayed tuned when I heard you were going to be on.
I wrote my thesis on CAP and nature conservation 20 years ago and have studied, worked within, and lectured on CAP and agri-environmental programmes and can largely second what you said on the programme and wrote above. There are some special cases, such as the Burren region in Ireland near to where I live – traditional grazing patterns have maintained phenomenal biodiversity in this karst landscape. However, I just have to look across the road to see a farmer destroy yet another nice little semi-wild wetland area, untouched for decades, presumably to add a few “eligible hectares” in “good agricultural and environmental condition” to his Single Farm Payment paid for by the European taxpayers. Not only is he draining and reclaiming a wetland, he’s doing it in the middle of the bird breeding season. I alerted the Wildlife Service who let themselves be convinced that this was “cleaning of watercourses and other normal maintenance works in the course of agricultural activity”. It breaks my heart.

The elephant-adaptedness of European trees is an fascinating concept. I love the idea of taking a walk around the forest and showing visitors the signs of the elephants that once roamed this place.
But how special is the fact that trees resprout when damaged? Resprouting seems like a survival strategy for damage by strong winds. And is resprouting after damage functionally different from sprouts coming out of the bark when light levels in the understorey increase?
The argument would be convincing if there were any places without resprouting native trees and with a certified history of not having megafauna. Do such places even exist?